October 16, 2013

Paul's Pick: Early Modern Digital Scholarship as Handwork and Brainwork

Every month, Paul Chase in the Penn Press Journals department invites our blog readers to download a complimentary article from one of our many scholarly journals.

Paul's pick for October is "Digital Scholarship as Handwork and Brainwork: An Early Modern History of Cryptography" by Katherine Ellison at Illinois State University. The article appears in the latest issue of the Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies.

The first computing machines, invented by Samuel Morland during the
seventeenth century, were distributed as part of a rhetorical project
underway at the time that was orchestrated by Royal Society members like
Morland and John Wilkins. Products of both brainwork, or creative
innovation, and handwork, or craft production, these machines reconnect
early modern scholars with the historical meaning of "digitization" as
the manipulation of media with the hand and challenge assumptions about
the differences between humanities scholarship and computer science
scholarship.